The top ten stories you’ve been reading on our site in 2018

Each year hundreds of thousands of people view articles on our site and we’re always interested in what you’re looking at. This year we had readers from 225 countries and territories. This includes one reader from each of Tonga, Chad, São Tomé and Príncipe, San Marino, Montserrat, Kiribati and Equatorial Guinea. Thank you very much for reading!

So, to mark the end of 2018, we thought we’d share the top ten stories, as read by you. And don't forget to read our month-by-month review of the year.

The 205 million-year-old jaw bone of a prehistoric reptile belongs to ‘one of the largest animals ever’ a group of international palaeontologists reported.

The bone belongs to a giant ichthyosaur, a type of prehistoric aquatic reptile, and experts estimated the length of this specimen’s body would have been up to 26 metres, approaching the size of a blue whale.

Scientists unlocked the secrets of how some predatory spiders catch their prey while hunting by successfully training one to jump different distances and heights for the first time.

The aim of the research was to answer the question of why jumping spider anatomy and behaviour evolved the way it did, and secondly, to use this improved understanding of spiders to imagine a new class of agile micro-robots that are currently unthinkable using today’s engineering technologies.

The world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer designed and built to work in the same way a human brain does was fitted with its landmark one-millionth processor core and switched on for the first time.

The million-processor-core ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture’ or ‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million transistors.

A forensic linguist from The University of Manchester who analysed letters supposedly signed by Jack the Ripper concluded that two of the most famous examples were written by the same person.

The Whitechapel murders that terrorised London in 1888 are still remembered thanks to the legend of Jack the Ripper, who was never caught.

In addition to the gruesomeness of the murders, Jack the Ripper’s name and persona were popularised by more than 200 letters which were received following the murders. These letters are essentially what made him famous, and it has often been suggested that they were written by journalists to sell more newspapers.

Doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals could soon be wearing uniforms brushed with tiny copper nanoparticles to reduce the spread of bacterial infections and viruses, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli), at hospitals.

Material scientists at The University of Manchester, working in collaboration with universities in China, created a ‘durable and washable, concrete-like’ composite material made from antibacterial copper nanoparticles. They also developed a way of binding the composite to wearable materials such as cotton and polyester, which has proved a stumbling block for scientists in the past.

The University reached its highest-ever position in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

Manchester was listed as the 34th best institution in the world, jumping four places in comparison to the previous year’s results. The table also ranked us as the 8th best university in the Europe, and 6th in the UK.

The most read story of the year was about a study of nearly half a million people which revealed that muscular strength, measured by handgrip, is an indication of how healthy our brains are.

Dr Joseph Firth, an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Manchester and Research Fellow at NICM Health Research Institute at Western Sydney University, crunched the numbers using UK Biobank data.